Chapter 1
“So why don’t you tell me about that day,” my therapist said, sitting back in her comfy armchair, the light coming in through the window behind her head creating a glowing halo. The room was all creams and warm greys, comfy as a blanket. So why was I fidgeting on my couch? Her pen hand rose as she watched me, moving slowly to the clipboard as I let out a long sigh and then began.
“Stay in your room,” my mother snapped, those elegant brows drawing down hard. “The doctor says you’ll be revealed any day now.”
“But, Mum—”
“Stay, Cyn.” She stood in the doorway, a picture of the perfect willowy beta, and she would be if it weren’t for me. For most of the family, designation reveals were a straightforward thing. You went to bed a child and woke up a beta—sensible, hard-working, reliable, stable. “I know you don’t like it. I know you want…”
Her eyes followed mine, to the massive picture window behind me. We lived in a house that shared borders with the woods beyond. My second home. As an only child, I’d found my friends in the trees themselves and the creatures within, along with those that I created with my mind.
“The doctor isn’t sure how you’ll reveal.” Her full lips thinned down into a definite burgundy line. “But it’ll be soon. You need to stay put. I mean it. No going into the forest. Tell me you understand.”
“I understand, Mum.”
r /> “Good girl.” Her mouth softened to almost a smile. “I’m sorry, sweetheart. I know this is hard. You want to be back at school, I need to be back at work. We’ve just got to wait this out. It won’t be long before you wake up and know what you are. Perhaps even an alpha.”
I saw it then, her aspirations for my seventeen-year-old body. It was evident in the shine in her eyes, the faraway look. To become an alpha was to put your stamp on the world, to climb to the upper echelons. To become someone. That agenda, no matter how benign, was a weird thing for me to witness. A destiny hand-picked and curated for me by someone else.
Then her smart watch beeped.
“I’m sorry, honey, I’ve got to join an online meeting. My boss is already baulking at the working from home conditions. You have your books, your art supplies, your tablet. Just think of this as a staycation until this is all sorted out.”
It took all of five minutes after she closed my door, when I heard her footsteps down the stairs and the door of her office opening and closing, for me to disobey her. I was usually pretty biddable, but not when it came to the forest.
She didn’t understand my need to go there but was able to rationalise it in terms of me being a strong, independent young woman, master of her domain. She listened to my stories, inspected my finds of robin’s egg shells the colour of the sky and leaves the most perfect shade of red or gold in the autumn, all with the same cool, calm interest she did everything. She loved me, I knew that. I’d had enough hugs, spent enough times curled up beside her on the couch, my head resting in her lap, her long elegant fingers trailing through my hair, to feel it. The fact she devoted so much time listening to, watching, talking about topics that she had no interest in made that apparent.
But love or not, the pull of the woods was something hard encoded in my blood, something I had no means to resist. Until I was revealed, I was a child, and this one loved the forest. So when she was locked away in her office, headset on, discussing forward projections and sales trajectories, I slid open my window, quiet as a mouse, and like a mouse, I scurried up the massive bough right outside, slid down the trunk in well-practised moves, and then felt it, the minute my feet hit the ground. The squish of damp earth, the crunch of leaves, and an electrical pulse I could never describe to another person because I hadn’t heard anyone articulate anything like it to me. It was a silent, secret feeling. One I craved like my next breath.
I was being difficult and this would cause my mother grief, so in honour of that, I looked back at the house, stared at the blind looking windows with their reflections of the sky above, and then turned my back on it all and walked into the forest, like a changeling, weaving between the trunks, down the winding path, until finally, it swallowed me whole.
I’d brought friends out here before, but they didn’t get it. It was boring and there was nothing to do, those domesticated children always said. They didn’t seem to feel the cool play of the breeze on your skin as a call to arms, didn’t trail their fingers over bark smooth and rough. Didn’t need to breathe in the resiny scents of conifers. There were no toys, no electronics, no expectations, and as a result, they had no idea what to do.
But I did.
I followed a circuitous route I always took, stopping to inspect the bushes growing new berries, glistening red and poisonous to boot. I paused when I heard the birds calling, watching them hop from tree to tree, poking their beaks into the open pine cones and ferreting out the pine nuts. I ducked under fallen boughs or walked along them like a balance beam, liking the way my body knew exactly how to move without falling. I stopped by the river, jumping down on a series of big flat rocks, to scoop up what my mother assured me was pathogen rich water but to me just tasted of earth and wet stone. I walked and I walked, taking in all the landmarks and sights, observing the way they were changing at the brink of the new season, my steel trap brain storing every change away.
Until I found them.
Other teenagers came out into the forest sometimes. It was a place to escape the eagle eyes of the adults, where they, like me, could be free. But what they did made my lips curl. Nests were destroyed with rocks, eggs left cracked and glistening on the ground with a wantonness that took my breath away. Fires were lit and not well controlled, leaving black scars on the land. And rubbish. They dragged all the stuff I wanted to escape from deep into the depths of the forest and left it scattered around, a small explosion of trash to mark their presence where it wasn’t wanted.
And then there was this.
I froze when I heard their voices. Too loud, declaring to the world all the things they were too scared to say when the adults were around, the shouts and whoops carried well through the forest. I shrunk down, slinking through trees and bushes, well-practised. I always knew where the hiding places were. I crept closer and closer still, spying on the interlopers.
Do all children stumble into adulthood this way? They were drinking, calling out, smashing bottles on the ground in a way that made me flinch, feeling the sharp shards in the soles of my feet, even as I stood several metres away. But it was them, young animals, full of their own strength and power and vicious with it, that had me pausing.
I’d seen foxes in the forests, snakes that would kill me with one bite, wild dogs too, but nothing frightened me as much as them. Young men, with the bodies of adults. Too tall, too muscular, voices too deep—alphas. But right now, they weren’t subsumed into the oppressive social structure that held the adults accountable. They had slipped away, wild and free, and were enjoying being let off the leash.
“Look what I found.”
My eyes jerked sideways, seeing a newcomer had arrived. Tousled dark brown hair and green eyes that appeared to glow in the forest depths, he presented a girl to the rest of the group, perched up on the wreck of a car dumped here long ago. They looked down at her like lions on a rock. One put the beer bottle he held to his lips, taking a long swallow, the others waiting until he threw it away, then jumping down and stalking closer.
“And what are you doing here, little omega?”
His voice sounded like the purr of my nan’s old grey cat, and how on earth was that possible? She seemed to wonder the same thing, staring up at him, wide-eyed—eyes that shone when he reached out and stroked the side of her face.
Marcus McCallum. She knew him, I knew him, everyone did. He had stalked the halls of my high school like he owned the place, and maybe he had. Before he left, the gossip around the school was that the teachers were scared of him, the male ones at least. And the females? I was unawakened, but even I had heard the stories about him and the biology teacher who’d been sent away. But for all his reputation, he looked like a golden god, similar to the images of angels in Renaissance paintings, with his longish blond hair, hazel eyes, and cheekbones as sharp as a knife blade.
Despite his alpha designation, I caught the slight shake of his hand as he stroked the girl. The omega, I corrected myself. This was bad, I knew that as sure as my next heartbeat. We’d had sex ed, had it all explained to us—the more decorous mating habits of betas, and then there were the alpha-omega pairings. Savage impulses driven by instincts hard-wired, pheromones and hormones, knotting and biting and…
Omegas were to be protected from the predations of alphas and their own instincts. To coerce or abuse one was to show yourself to be weak. We’d all heard the message over and over, knew it was up to us to keep them safe.
But safe was not this forest, not with those boys. This girl, this omega, she didn’t see the trees or the birds or the changing coloured leaves on the ground. She just saw them. The others peeled off the car, dropping down, and surrounded the girl in a wall of muscle, something that just made her quiver. I watched her eyes roll back the moment they came close, dragging their noses down her neck, breathing her in.
“She’s in heat?”